June 23, 2004

Notable News

It's time now to talk about global warming because, let's face it, this globe of ours is getting warm. There are many culprits responsible for this planet-wide threat, ranging from fossil fuel emissions, to CFCs to industrial pollutants. But perhaps no other threat promises to warm our globe faster than the unchecked and unforgivable burping of sheep.

Scientists have developed a serum to reduce methane gas in burping sheep, cows and other ruminants to combat global warming, a German magazine reported on Monday.

The Hanover-based monthly Technology Review will report in its July issue that Andre-Denis Wright, a molecular biologist at Australia's CSIRO Institute, has found a vaccine that reduced the methane emissions of sheep by eight percent.

This is groundbreaking news, people! No longer will you have to drive by a pasture of grazing sheep and turn away in disgust knowing that the peptic grazers are belching our planet's demise. No, now you can still turn away, but with eight percent less disgust.

I, for one, am greatly relieved to know that the scientific minds of the world are engaged in such important work as vaccinating burping sheep and discovering such important information as:

Sheep produce 20 grams of methane each day, or seven kg per year, the magazine with 80,000 subscribers reported. Cows produce about 114 kg per year of methane (CH4) -- a gas 21 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, the main gas blamed for driving up temperatures.

Speaking of bodily emanations, the city of El Paso, Texas was recently named Yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/nm/20040616/od_nm/life_sweaty_dc">America's sweatiest city.

Accordig to the article, another scientist with entirely too much time on his hands dedicated many precious research hours to make his discovery, research hours that could have been better spent addressing flatulating swine.

Research scientist Tim Long calculated heat indexes and relative humidity levels to come up with his top 100 sweatiest cities in America list.

By Long's calculations, in just four hours, El Paso's residents produce enough sweat to fill an Olympic swimming pool, with individuals shedding more than 36 fluid ounces of perspiration an hour.

"We enjoy over 300 sunny days a year with a very dry, temperate climate," said El Paso Mayor Joe Wardy, who is donating to charity what P&G said it is giving him for his city's dubious honor -- a year's supply of antiperspirant. "We were recently ranked as one of the seven best cities to retire in. Every one here knows that this publicity stunt is not based on good science."

Apparently, the good folks of El Paso don't realize that sweating is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, in Nepal, it's something to be revered.

Priests offered special prayers as hundreds of devotees thronged a shrine in a remote Nepali village on Wednesday to appease a Hindu deity after its stone idol began "sweating," witnesses said.

"Sweating" of the deity at the temple in Dolakha, 140 km (90 miles) east of the capital, has in the past been followed by major political changes or tragedies in the world's only Hindu kingdom, villagers say.

The special prayers were offered after devotees saw a vaporous substance on the stone idol of the god Bhimeshwor, revered as Lord Shiva, third in the trinity of Hindu gods. Goats were also sacrificed as part of the prayers.

It was not immediately known whether or not the goats were belching at the time of their sacrifice.

Yeah, leblanc, except for the fact that most (if not all) factory farms are required by law to recycle the methane and use it as fuel. The same holds true for most modern landfills, which collect the methane and burn it as fuel. But nevermind all that.